Chapter 7 #6
Rodney’s hand flashed out. Slapped Jeremy across the face, his head jerking to the side. Not a hard slap, but loud in the deathly quiet that followed. With bright, watery eyes, Jeremy brought his hand up to his cheek.
“I warned you,” Rodney said in a dull voice. “I warned you about those words.”
“You hit me,” Jeremy whispered, a tear falling onto his cheek.
“And I hate myself for it,” Rodney said. “But I will not allow you to speak to your father that way.”
Jeremy stood, chair scraping against the floor. He looked at Don. “You aren’t my real father.” He turned to Rodney. “And neither are you.”
He left, the front door banging open.
Rodney sat at the table with his face in his hands.
They didn’t hear from Jeremy for over a month after that.
Don would drive by his apartment almost every day, hoping for a glimpse.
Calls went unreturned. Friends didn’t seem to know much about what he was doing, or so they said.
Rodney went to his job at the fast-food place, only to be told Jeremy had quit two months before.
He finally called five weeks later. He told them he was in Montana, camping on his own. He didn’t know how long he’d be. He’d met some people. He wanted to travel with them. He sounded manic.
“Please come home,” Don said, gripping the phone, Rodney leaning his head in to listen. “We miss you.”
Jeremy laughed. “You do? Why?”
“Because we love you.”
“I was near a lake this morning,” he said. “I heard voices in the water. On the other side of the lake, I saw shadows standing, watching me. No one else could see them. I can’t ever tell if they’re real or not.”
And then he disconnected.
“He’ll call back,” Don said, more to himself than Rodney. “He’ll call back.”
He didn’t. For four months, they didn’t know where he was.
They checked hospitals, jails, John Does that had been found on the sides of roads.
They filed a missing person report at month three, but they only knew where he’d been, not where he was going.
And besides, the officer told them, he’s legally an adult.
He can do what he wants. No one can force him to go anywhere.
A smirk on the cop’s face: “Maybe he didn’t want two dads for parents? ”
At the beginning of the fifth month, they came home to find Jeremy leaving the house. Two other people were with him. A man, a woman, both looking unwashed and faded. Jeremy was carrying their television out the front door. The one from the living room.
He smiled at them nervously, eyes darting to the strangers and then back to Rodney and Don. “Hey.”
“What are you doing?” Rodney asked.
“These the queers?” the woman asked. She laughed, an obnoxious, grating little sound. The man slipped an arm around her waist, holding her close.
“Where are you taking the television?” Don asked, gobsmacked.
Greedily, he drank Jeremy in. He looked skinnier, bags under his eyes like bruises.
His hair was stringy, oily. It didn’t seem like he’d eaten a good meal in a long while.
The skin under his right eye was twitching involuntarily. It looked like a tic.
It was then Rodney noticed the other car.
A piece-of-shit beater. No paint, only primer.
And the back hatch was open, filled with stuff from the house.
Not stuff from Jeremy’s room, no, but Don and Rodney’s things.
A record player. The Macintosh computer.
Tools. An expensive painting that had hung on the wall of their house since before Jeremy. Cuff links, leather dress shoes.
Rodney turned to his son, wearing a haunted expression. Jeremy still held the television, though barely. “Are you stealing from us?” Rodney asked in a flat voice.
“Jeremy, no,” Don said.
A myriad of emotions crossed their son’s face: guilt, fury, embarrassment. He said, “It’s not what it looks like.”
“Then tell me what it is,” Rodney said. “Because I’ll tell you what it looks like. And if it looks like what I think it is, then … I don’t know what else to do but call the cops.”
“Ooh,” the woman said as the man snickered. His pupils were dilated, the irises of his eyes thin slivers.
“Fine,” Jeremy grunted, and let go of the television. It dropped to the porch, screen cracking as it tumbled down the steps. “Now no one can use it.”
“Let’s go,” the man said. “I don’t fuck with cops.”
Don almost laughed. Something they had in common.
The woman blew a kiss at them before going to the car.
Jeremy followed them. Rodney grabbed him by the wrist. “Please,” he said.
Please.
Jeremy looked down at his hand, lips pulling back over his teeth. And then he shoved Rodney with his free hand. Rodney stumbled, fell onto his rear.
They didn’t see him again for close to a year, during a week of heavy rain that didn’t seem to be letting up anytime soon. A knock at the door, and Jeremy was there, soaked to the bone, his eye blackened, lip split. “Hey,” he said, looking down at his feet. “Can I crash here?”
They let him in.
He wanted to get better, he told them the next morning. He didn’t want to be like this anymore. He wept, his head down his arms. “Why is it so hard being alive?” he sobbed. “Why is it so hard being human?”
They had him admitted. Voluntarily, but they hoped this was the fabled rock-bottom.
That he could sink no lower and now would be the time to rise.
And for a while, it looked like it could be that way.
Ninety days in the facility. A diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder.
New and plentiful medications to try and regulate it.
Some good, some so terrible it was like Jeremy was a drooling zombie.
He checked himself out on day forty-nine.
He disappeared and reappeared at random.
Sometimes only days would go by. Other times weeks.
The longest was fourteen months. They’d worry, they’d fret, they’d hope, but they couldn’t do much beyond that.
It was one thing telling a child that they needed help, it was another thing entirely when it came to an adult.
He’d show up sometimes on his meds, and tell them stories of his travels, all the things he’d seen, the people he’d met.
He’d be bright and happy, his hair longer and pulled up into a messy bun.
And then there were the times when he’d be manic, lost, speaking to people who weren’t there, jumping at every sound as if it were something coming to attack him. He’d sleep for days on end and then disappear again. Sometimes things would be missing from the house after these visits.
It came to a head the day that Jeremy had gone after Don.
He was twenty-six, and though no one knew it then, only had eight years left alive. He’d been at the house for two days, mostly holed up in his room. Don had come home from work to have lunch, and to maybe see if Jeremy wanted to go out for dinner.
When he received no answer to his knocking on the bedroom door, he’d pushed it open.
Jeremy was on the bed, eyes closed, a plastic tube wrapped around his arm, just above the crook of his elbow. A needle stuck out of his arm. On the nightstand next to him, a spoon with burnt tinfoil, and the stench of something like cat urine in the air.
He opened his eyes at Don’s gut-punch exhalation.
It’s not what it looks like.
It’s not a big deal.
Everyone does it.
I’m not an addict.
I can stop anytime I want.
It makes me feel better.
It clears my head.
Jesus fucking Christ, why are you always on my ass?
I can do whatever the fuck I want.
This is my room.
“This is my house,” Don replied in a shaky voice.
Without warning, Jeremy shot up from the bed. Skinny, but taller than Don. Jeremy put his hands around Don’s throat and shoved him against the wall again and again and again, head hitting plaster hard enough to crack. Dazed, Don slumped to the floor as Jeremy let go.
“Fuck you,” he heard Jeremy say in a low voice. And then he was gone.
Rodney found Don sitting in the same place when he came home a few hours later.
When he saw the hands-and-finger-shaped bruises around Don’s neck, he bellowed in rage, tearing through the house to see if Jeremy was still somewhere inside.
He wasn’t. By the time he came back to Don, Rodney was already on the phone, calling for emergency services.
Don didn’t want to go to the hospital, but Rodney wouldn’t hear of it. Luckily, Jeremy hadn’t done much damage, aside from the bruising. Don would have a sore throat for a good while, and the bruising would take time to fade. The nurse in the ER asked him if he was being abused.
When they got home late in the evening, Rodney said, “Never again.”
“He’s our son.”
“He is,” Rodney agreed. “And I love him. You know that. But never again, Don. I won’t put us in this position again.”
They changed the locks on the house. Got a security package: cameras, door sensors, the whole works.
They hated themselves for it, more than Don thought possible.
This was their son, the boy they’d adopted, the boy they loved with everything they had and had given a home to.
How could it have come to this? They didn’t have an answer to that, at least not one that held any merit.
Blaming themselves seemed easiest, and they did that in spades.
Maybe if they’d gotten him in to different, better doctors.
Or maybe if they’d been stricter when he was younger.
Different teachers. A different school. Something.
Maybe, maybe, maybe: all the roads not traveled, the ones where Jeremy was happy, carefree, making something of himself.
The ones where he didn’t feel like his brain was on fire.
The ones where he grew up and graduated and found his place in the world.
Maybe a wife or a husband. Children, one day, children that Don and Rodney could dote on in their later years.
But no, no, that wasn’t what happened.